Follow-up a few years after https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25584421
Are you tempted by M2 / M3? I'm still happily plugging away on a base m1 mini (8/256) and don't feel like I've noticed any degradation here 3 years later.
I have a base m1 mini also. Ever since I bought it I've only used it hooked up to my 4K TV in my living room. I use it all day long. I have it connected to an external hard drive or two sometimes. It's connected to the network using the gigabit ethernet. I don't notice any slowdowns with it and I've always been on the beta updates for the operating system. I use edge as my browser. Sometimes I mess around with xcode or other background stuff with no issue. Sometimes I'll mess around with games on the device or mess around with emulators or DosBox. Usually I access my main PC using parsec over the local network and I'll use my Windows PC that way or I'll play games on it sometimes on the big TV. I'm tempted to upgrade but not all that much. Basically this m1 Mac mini would have to break for me to need to want to upgrade it. But when I do have to replace it it will be another completely silent system. I love how the fan has never turned on even once.
FWIW, I've had a M1, M1 Pro, and M2 Max laptop (different work/personal machines) all with fans, but I've never heard them turn on in several years of development work, no matter how many windows, apps, etc. I had open or how many things I was compiling.
The only times I heard the fan turn on were when the GPU was heavily burdened, like AAA games, especially when they're emulated in Rosetta or Wine. But for everything else, the fans never came on. These days, I suspect they'd come on for AI training (but I never tried).
Just anecdotal data for anyone contemplating an upgrade to one of the fanned versions. They tend to be more powerful than the non-fanned versions, but in regular everyday use you would likely never hear them. I didn't even know they had fans until I tried to play graphics-intensive games on them.
Like the Apple TV, I view the Mac Mini as an under-appreciated product that sees very little love from Apple. They're both great products at a decent price.
I have a mid-2012 quad-core Mac Mini that worked as a network file server until I replaced it very recently. It still works fine though. I'm almost a little sad at the thought of selling it.
Personal laptop is M1 MBP 14" 16GB/512GB. It's great, the only thing I'm tempted by is the form factor and weight of the M2 Air.
My main work laptop is a 2019 16" MBP with an 8 core i9 and it seems like an old piece of shit in comparison. It has serious issues managing heat and power consumption. It actively loses battery when plugged in if I use an external display while being in a video call.
I'm on a basic M1 Macbook Air and don't feel limited at all, and am not tempted at all by anything new. I'm doing pretty heavy development on it on several projects, play around with producing music with Bitwig, battery is great, I love this machine.
M1 Pro base model which is what we usually get in LATAM.
Zero issues other than disk space (500gb gone, no downloads, only work stuff) due to Android and iOS SDKs. I have and love a Dell dock to use the bigger monitor and their webcams.
Also I wish I could use it on my lap for more than 10 minutes, but I always feel the heat "there", even though its not really that hot, its enough to bother.
I'd probably test the bigger version next time, if reasonable, to see if coding in other environments becomes even better. I use that Nextstand plastic thing and it weights nothing, super useful for longer coding on the go.
I have a M1 Air and Mini and they're great. Well powered, quiet, sips battery. Just nothing at all to complain about.
Compared to my MBP 16 with the i9 from Intel, I cant wait to upgrade to the new M MBP. My MBP 16" with the i9 by comparison runs the fan quite a lot for using maybe 20% of capacity and just now I checked and its warm to the touch sitting here at 96% idle. Its not particularly fast and it seems to get loaded down running chrome alone. The M1s never seem to slow down or balk no matter what I do to them.
Battery life on the M1 Air is superb compared to what Im used to also.
I have an M1 MacBook Pro 16" I've had for almost two years and it's great. I recently got a minimal M1 Mini to replace an ancient iMac that died. the mini is really good as well. For my money these are the best computers I've had. Overall very happy with the Apple ecosystem (phone, watch, TV, etc). I do think their fees for upgrading memory and disk are crazy. I use an external SSD as the disk for the mini. I also have an OpenBSD Thinkpad (very old), an old desktop with Arch Linux, and a newer desktop with Windows 11. The MacBook is 95% of my computing time though.
My work laptop is an m1 16/500 and I’m not remotely concerned about an upgrade. It continues to perform well in virtually any circumstance. Ironically, the only place I’ve seen it have any trouble (take longer than I think it should) is Swift Playgrounds.
My personal machine is a 2014 13” MBP. I’m eager to replace it with an Apple Silicon machine, but that requires justifying the expense to my wife, and frankly that Laptop continues to do just fine.
I’ve been thinking about replacing my SSD. This is a solid laptop. With OpenCore patcher it’ll (Probably) last as long Apple makes builds for Intel - another 5 years or so.
Runs Baldur's Gate 3 on high settings without any lag, though a lot of heat. Also builds Android Studio quicker than most other laptops. Those are my benchmarks, and I'm satisfied.
I got an M1 Max with 64GB RAM when it first came out. It’s been very exciting being able to run some of the latest LLMs (like mixtral) completely locally, it’s not something I anticipated being able to do when purchasing!
M1 MacBook Pro 16" and I love it. I don't really see a need yet to upgrade to an M2 or M3 but, then again, I'm starting the process of developing VisionPro apps so that may change.
recently upgraded from my m1 air to m3 mbp 14 for ports reasons and for having bigger keyboard. but where happy til last day using it. perfomance was absolutely fine for running vim + firefox...
M1 Air w/ 16GB of ram, and don't feel compelled to upgrade. Except, maybe, to an M series model that will allow 2 screens.
I bought an M1 Air 8GB for someone else and they complained it was slow. I asked them to remove their plastic protective cover and the lower temp has appeared to fix their complaint.